Survival Hunter Boss by Boss Recommended Builds and Tips

The following was compiled by looking at a combination of simulation data, common sense, and log analysis of the top performing hunters. All percentages shown are from the top 25 parses out of the first 200 completions for each boss, in order to ensure we're looking at progression-focused players, not anyone "cheesing" the fights to get meaningless dps. On that note, the following is meant to help SV Hunters to aid their raid team in killing bosses as quickly as possible. It is not meant to be advise on how to get top parses in general, or how to most effectively farm a boss you've already killed.

Perpare to Harpon between Atrigan and Belac a little early, to avoid getting clipped by their AoE and gaining Tourment.

Put up DoTs on your current target right before having to swap; they will not generate Tourment if they're applied before Lame d'os or Bourrasque gangrenée. This is easiest done with Echarper to apply Morsure de serpent to both bosses, if your raid keeps them close-ish to eachother. You can also sometimes get Piège explosif to tick on both bosses, but be careful as their hit-boxes are not as large as most raid bosses, and you may just miss hitting either of them.

Caltrops re-applies every second, and can cause serious problems with your torment if used wrong. As such, it is not recommended for this fight.

If your raid team is lacking in decent ranged players, you can help with the feeding the whale Encre répugnante, but only do so if you have Désengagement and Harpon both ready to reduce lost up-time on the boss.

Hunters have great respect for other hunters, and don't like to kill each other, so take a moment to think about how awesome these Huntresses are... then go ahead and kill them.

As with many fights, timing your movement boosts using Désengagement and Harpon. Try to use these to quickly clear your stacks by crossing the moon line at the last minute before the moon cycle.

Moontalon should not be alive long enough to get the full damage from Piège d’acier, so make sure not to cast it where she will trigger it. Using Cobra cracheur while Moontalon is up is helpful if your team is having trouble getting it down quickly enough, and should swap targets with you after Moontalon dies. If you are using Corbeaux hargneux, try to use it about 14 seconds before moontalon dies so you can get CD resets on it; this also helps ensure you're doing max damage to it between 25% and 0% HP.

If in the corporeal realm, use all of your AoE burst while the adds are above 50% health.

In the final phase, use all of your Boucherie charges quickly while your side (corporeal or spirit) is stacking in, then switch to your normal single target rotation on the big guy until you can move back in again.

Use Désengagement to jump into the big hole at the last possible minute.

It can be tempting to use Aspect du guépard to run through the orbs ahead of everyone else. Don't do this. You'll be kicked out of the hunter club and forced to go play a support class. It is, however, acceptable to use Cheetah toward the end of that phase to grab an extra orb or two that your group was going to miss anyway.

When dealing with Chaos délié, instead of running away, start at your max range (about five yards from the bosses hit box), and then slowly move in toward the boss. If you line up the green swirly drops closely, you should be able to keep dealing damage the entire time.

Voie des Mok’Nathal has the highest damage potential in the level 15 tier. However, it also has a high skill cap, and shouldn't be taken on progression if doing so will cause you to make mechanical mistakes, or will just occupy too much of your attention. If you feel completely comfortable with it, it can be used to great success on any of the fights in Tomb of Sargeras.

Regardless of the fight, about 15-20% of top parsing hunters take Corbeaux hargneux, and about 80-85% take Chasseur de serpents, this may be primarily a matter of preference. It's possible we might see more uses of Blessures mortelles later on when more people have the tier 20 set bonus, but for now, it's not really being used by top performing hunters.

Grenade de feu draconique is starting to see some use, perhaps due to the buff it got for patch 7.2.5; however, it's still used much, much less than the other two level 90 tier talents. For the vast majority of SV hunters, the decision on this tier is one of Morsure de serpent for single-target/priority-target, or Boucherie for burst AoE.

For other specs, we see Ame du maître chasseur being swapped in and out depending on various talents taken. For SV hunters, this doesn't seem to be the case at all, and we only rarely saw top performing SV hunters wearing Ame du maître chasseur.

For the most part, Survival Hunters have a lot possible variations in both talent builds and Legendary usage. Outside of Appel de la Nature, which 81%-96% of top performing SV Hunters used on every single fight, there's no clear cut, obvious rule for which legendary goes in which situation.

Secret de Sephuz was used a lot for single target fights, though never in more than 56% of top parses on any given single target fight.

Similarly, Tablier d'os du Boucher was used a lot for multi-target fights (when Boucherie is choosen), but again, on AoE fights it still was only taken about 60% of the time.

Changing from Tier 19 to Tier 20 Gear

There's no one size fits all solution for when to swap out your Tier gear. In general, the tier 19 set bonuses are considerably stronger than tier 20, and benefit both AoE and Single-target. However, Agility is very strong for SV hunters, so we'll likely go ahead and swap out fairly early, unless you're fortunate enough to have a lot of high ilvl, titanforged tier 19 pieces.

If you choose to hold onto your higher ilvl tier 19 gear, try to use the gear from the slots with the lowest stat budgets, like the Cloak, the Gauntlets or the Spaulders.